(TL;DR: People that don’t like the wiki as it is ought look at the official Emacs documentation instead. I wrote this so that I’d have something to link to in the future. This post was inspired by 2012-03-20.)✎

Every year or so, I read about suggested changes to the Emacs Wiki. The complaints are the same, year after year.✎

The first problem is the mistaken belief that technology can substitute for social change. Yes, the wiki is badly organized and many of the pages are outdated. Changing the wiki engine, the backend or the formatting rules will not change this, however.✎

The backend used by the wiki engine can influence performance and resource use, it can make the software harder or easier to maintain and backup—but it will not induce somebody to edit a messy page and fix it.✎

The second problem is the mistaken belief that moderation can be commanded. You can complain about bad editing and a lack of moderation all day. But since nobody is paying people to do a boring job, we must rely on obsessive compulsive people to fix typos and tag pages.✎

Maybe we could attract more people by gamifying the experience—offer rewards, badges, scores. But Stack Overflow already does this. It’s the best social question answering machine currently known. The wiki doesn’t need to imitate something better. The wiki needs to do what it does best. We’ll come to that.✎

The third problem is the mistaken belief that quality control and volunteers go well together. Just compare Wikipedia and Citizendium and consider the animosity generated by Deletionism on Wikipedia. How will you encourage authors to contribute if you are telling them that their contributions are lacking the quality you are looking for instead of simply accepting their text and working on it?✎

You fight spam, you rework text occasionally, you encourage others, you welcome newbies, you lead by example. That’s how you lead.✎

An abrasive personality, radical change involving a lot of work—those are not the tools you are looking for.✎

Let me return to the issue of commanding change. Things people have said:✎

“the content editing should be one with the goal of creating a comprehensive, coherent, article that gives readers info or tutorial about the subject.” – Xah Lee (2008)✎

“I favor a major reorganization of the wiki material.” – Neil Smithline (2011)✎

“Wiki is a hydra you cannot cut enough heads off to make it die. I tried, and failed miserably. I suggest you don’t waste your efforts and time on that.” – Eli Zaretskii (2014)✎

“What I propose is starting anew and getting rid of a few common complaints at once.” – wasamasa (2015)✎

The critics can be unhappy about it all they want, and they can complain about it all they want—but in the end, one needs to understand the forces at work, here. There is no chain of command.✎

It works just like a free software project. If it doesn’t scratch someone’s itch, nobody is going to add it. I think it’s a fundamental issue with our business model: there is no pay for boring stuff. Plus, documentation is of no direct use for anything—unlike code. Thus, people are mostly motivated to keep their own code and its documentation up to date. I don’t think there is anything we can do about that. That’s why the Emacs Wiki Mission Statement does not mention organization and quality. It cannot be commanded.✎

Once we accept that this is the sand upon which we are building our house, we necessarily need to scale down our expectations. Personally, I think the wiki exists somewhere between the official documentation, Stack Overflow, the FAQ, the newsgroups, the mailing lists, and IRC. It’s certainly nowhere near the quality of organization and writing that the Emacs documentation has—and I don’t think this is the right medium to aim for this level of quality. I think the people willing to invest that amount of energy to write quality stuff ought to be writing the real Emacs documentation—and they probably are.✎

What remains are the people using Emacs Wiki for their own pet projects, questions asked, answers given, sometimes organized, sometimes rewritten, sometimes linked to the rest of the site.✎

Wikipedia works because of its universal appeal. When I added an image to an obscure Indian temple we visited when I was staying in Mysore, the photo was terrible. But it was a start, and enough people cared about the page and it grew, and it found people to tend it, and now it’s big and beautiful.✎

There just aren’t enough Emacs users and authors out there and the best of us will be contributing to the official Emacs documentation. The wiki exists somewhere between the official documentation and the mailing lists. Lower your expectations.✎

The wikis I knew, C2 and Meatball Wiki, had attracted a particular community and they had created a particular subculture I liked. We talked about the Wiki Now and many other things that made wikis work. The medium itself was interesting.✎

I had been posting on the newsgroups for a long time, and slowly I realized that the same questions kept being asked again and again. The newsgroups and mailing lists were failing as a medium because they were ephemeral. Sure, we kept telling people to search the archives. But the medium afforded asking questions instead of searching.✎

When I looked for Frequently Asked Questions, I found a document online, maintained by a single person. This person was a bottleneck. The FAQ updated slowly.✎

At the time I was getting into Internet Relay Chat. On IRC, conversation is even more ephemeral than on the mailing list. This time, however, “searching the archives” was out of the question. We needed our own archive. And thus I started answering questions on IRC and posting the answers on the wiki.✎

I think this last point bears consideration: I was creating pages or adding information to pages because it was pertinent on IRC. An index, linking to the page, categorization, returning to the page later and reworking it, all these quality related tasks were not pertinent on IRC. All I needed was a pastebin that I could go back to and rewrite if I felt like it. Often I did not—and I still don’t.✎

The wiki being on the web, updated every now and then, with pertinent answers to specialized questions, unorganized and raw, ended up being a good resource for the search engines out there. These search engines bring new people to the site. People that don’t understand how wikis work in general and how this wiki grew to be where it is in particular. They are shocked. So many pages outdated! Such a mess in style and quality!✎

I think those people are better served reading the official documentation. They don’t want this mess, they don’t benefit from it’s loose rules, they don’t understand how cool it is to have a site with no login required. They are better served elsewhere.✎

I’m sure that one day the Emacs Wiki will have become irrelevant. But just like the old newsgroups never disappeared entirely, so will the wiki transform into something else and remain part of our information landscape.✎

Perhaps one of the Emacs Wiki critics will one day set up an alternate site, pull all the pages (more than 8500 pages last time I checked), extract the quality content—or rewrite it from scratch—and produce something better. Perhaps they will build an organization that can keep the quality up, encourage new authors to join, provide more value to their readers. But I don’t think complaining about the existing Emacs Wiki is a step in the right direction. Build it, and they will come—elsewhere.✎

Comments

> the mistaken belief that technology can substitute for social change
✎

Well, simply having a “talk” page for each wiki page (with a big link at the top) would let people have conversations about those pages without cluttering them up. And having an actual, complete revision history would help someone figure out what happened to a completely messed-up page. But EmacsWiki doesn’t seem to have those things. Its technology is too primitive to reasonably support – much less encourage – a workable society.✎

AlexSchroeder Sean, if the lack of a complete revision history is what held you back from reworking and reorganizing, then I guess you’re right. I am keeping all the logs, but discarding all the older revisions after two weeks and never felt the lack.✎

The addition of Talk pages was discussed a while ago—it was one of the items on the suggestions page—but at the time we had two votes in favor and two votes against them. Nobody else seemed to care. I’ll be surprised if their mere existence improves the pages. But I guess we’ll see, now. Good luck to you all!✎

After a quick look at the site I’ll suggest that you should add licensing terms as quickly as possible. As it stands, you cannot copy anything from Emacs Wiki. That would require a copyleft license.✎

SeanO Alex – I’d say my laziness and your sneering condescension were greater obstacles. But if I don’t check in for more than 2 weeks (quite likely, given how little time I have for Emacs these days), I’d still like to be able to see what happened if something I cared about (e.g. the Perl page or my homepage) went bad. (How much, to an order of magnitude Euros and hours’ work, would it cost you to keep a complete revision log, by the way?)✎

I guess the Talk page issue came and went in a revision window when I didn’t have time to hang out here.✎

I’m also tired of your pseudo-legal threats toward the content of the wiki (which is under GPL2, not GFDL).✎

(This comment is protected by the GFDL, I guess. Whatever that means.)✎

AlexSchroeder I wonder where you felt my sneering condescension. Perhaps in my replies to people I felt were trying to tell me what to do in my free time and with my money? I also don’t think I threatened you in any way. Perhaps you missed the problems I had with changes to the Emacs Wiki license in its early days. I was trying to help you or Bozhidar not make the same mistake.✎

The logs are there for all to see if you follow the links. Here’s the the SiteMap history, for example. Keeping all the old revisions would cost me nothing – it’s simply a setting. I prefer it this way. As I said, I think keeping the old revisions provides no benefit and adds a number of small drawbacks such as needing administrators to permanently hide particular revisions that contain material deemed problematic from a legal perspective. As it stands, I can undo these edits and with time, they are gone. Another issue is that I like the idea of a right to be forgotten. The original C2 wiki kept no revisions at all. I think that the only reason old revisions need to be kept at all is peer review and anti-spam and anti-vandalism measures. For those tasks, a small time window is sufficient. After all, wiki pages are not code. We don’t need to look through the history of a page to find when bugs were introduced and by whom.✎

P.S.: EmacsWiki:WikiDownload links to a CVS repository of the source files hosted on the wiki, a subversion repo with daily snapshots of all the wiki pages, and a new, up to date git repo of all the pages with full history. I guess in a way my preference regarding the right to be forgotten is already moot since deleted stuff can be pulled out of the archives. This just hides deleted info from casual visitors.✎

PhilHudson Excellent riposte, Alex. We who criticize the wiki should pay attention. I would like to thank you for this consistently useful resource and your dedication. I certainly don’t detect any sneering on your part. Having said that, I do think there are a lot of real and fixable problems with the wiki, the worst being the hosting of code with neither “proper” SCM nor automatic notification of changes. Once you’ve used LaunchPad and (especially) github, this is just not tolerable. So I’m going to see what if anything I can do to help any new project.✎

AlexSchroeder I see the problem! I think people like me don’t feel bad about keeping code that consists of a single file on the wiki because we usually don’t think of these files as requiring maintenance. After all, that’s how gnu.emacs.sources used to work. The wiki has the benefit of providing a stable URL, but the process remains essentially the same: post & forget, possibly have discussions with other people via email, followed by another post & forget.✎

To me, creating a separate project on Savannah or Source Forge is an unacceptable overhead for files like EmacsWiki:rcirc-color.el or EmacsWiki:rcirc-controls.el. But if somebody else felt like taking those files, putting them up on some other site – excellent! At first, color-theme.el was hosted on Emacs Wiki. Eventually somebody took it, moved it elsewhere, and started a real project. Great!✎

I still think that the Emacs Wiki can act as a low barrier-to-entry incubator for all those small little files that need a place on the web. I don’t read gnu.emacs.sources anymore, and I don’t think many other people do. At the same time, I think there still are a lot of people without their own web pages out there. They can’t post code on Facebook or Google+ and I imagine uploading code to Wordpress and Blogspot sites is also unwieldy. For all those people, the Emacs Wiki offers an alternative. It’s a bit better than gnu.emacs.sources and Lisppaste but a far cry from a software forge.✎

If people would take popular code from the wiki to a forge, repackage it as a real project, that would be great.✎

Phil, I just remembered EmacsWiki:Git repository. Maybe that helps? I know Jonas is very enthusiastic about it and has been pestering me for weeks when I dragged my feet. ;) I’m sure he’d appreciate help or some nice words.✎

Phil, regarding Github: I’m not much of a github user. I see that git and github bring a lot of relevant new features to the table. Compared with other version control systems they facilitate forking on a grand scale. Do you feel that using Mediawiki introduces a similar set of new features that will revolutionize how wiki pages are edited and organized? I don’t see it, which is why I cannot imagine that Xah’s and Bozhidar’s idea of switching to Mediawiki will in fact help solve the quality issues they have with Emacs Wiki.✎

stack exchange websites are viral in nature, that’s why they are becoming popular. But that does not help to bring the high-quality content. A lot of dumb people come in just to get points and become “cool”, for some reason their incompetence does not scare them away. This results in very high amounts of wrong answers. Possible solution: dump the score system! It is not a fucking computer game, you know… 😩✎

I don’t know why, but most people feel that downvoting is offensive. I downvote pretty frequently, but other competent people simply ignore the wrong answers, because there is a shitload of them. It is not possible to explain every idiot why he is an idiot, so I guess that it is a right decision to just give up. On a wiki, such educational comments or edits are usually peer-reviewed, which increases the overall intellect of the community. On stack exchange your comment is just ignored, because most comments are usually hidden, and people don’t bother reading them. The only one who will see your comment is the author of the answer, and he will probably just ignore it.✎

Moderation is bullshit. I like to revise my answers, because I am a human and I do mistakes sometimes. But on stackoverflow, you can’t edit more than like 10 old answers per day… So I was coming back to stackoverflow for several days in a row to fix some of my answers, and know what? I received a personal message from some moderator. Look:✎

This just proves that there is no point to have authorities on such websites. Just let the peer review to do its thing. ✎

Refactoring is not possible. For example, double answers are frequent. Yes, sometimes it happens that two identical answers are posted with a 10 second delay, and people don’t bother to delete one of them. Usually both are voted up and you end up with duplicated information. Not so bad, but there is just something wrong with the system.✎

There is no “Recent Changes” thing. If there is, then where the fuck is it? Perhaps oh-mighty-moderators can see it.✎

You cannot change something massively. There is no such thing as bulk replace. And if you start doing something like this, you will get punished. This is a little bit different from refactoring. While refactoring is about doing huge edits on some page, now I’m talking about fixing some common problem in bulk on many pages. So, I stumbled upon some idiot on stackoverflow who kept giving bullshit bash answers and I spent half of an hour revising his other answers and voting them down, sometimes describing the problem (sometimes because I don’t want to link to the same problem more than once). And you know what? That worked! At first, he got angry, but then he started revising his answers, and I was giving an upvote for every fixed one. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Well, yeah, until some moderator came in and rolled back all my voting… Great. I think exactly the same would have happened if I was editing his answers myself. See? I don’t even have a right to vote. Even though every downvote is -1 point while upvotes are +10.✎

Shitloads of duplicate questions. One of the reasons is that the content is not structured in any way. But the problem is that you cannot simply close a question as a duplicate, because old answers are rarely revised and are usually out of date. And you cannot get on that old question page and start begging for a fresh information, there is simply no mechanism for that (yea, that’s one of the downsides of not having recent changes).✎

Some people come to get instant help, and they ask questions that will never be helpful to somebody else. For example, they paste a piece of their code and ask why something is not working. This is justified sometimes, but HEY GUYS, we have IRC for that.✎

This might be different in emacs stack exchange, but it just shows how such systems are defective by design. And I believe that emacswiki will stay as good as it is now, even if thousands of idiots start migrating to it.✎

Stack exchange is very new, all we have to do is wait a few years until it is filled with useless bullshit.✎

Alex Schroeder Hm, you are clearly much better informed than I am. I just type a ton of Java and Oracle questions into Google every working day of the week and so many of these answers are found on Stack Exchange it’s amazing. This works so well because many of my questions are simple and stupid and even those questions get asked and answered. I guess that’s where the low hanging fruit are if you are into the points.✎

And I see no reason why something like Ask Page Extension couldn’t be installed on emacswiki. Even tagging extension can be integrated with it. You will get the same ask button, questions feed and no scoring system – PERFECT. And as a bonus this will be highly integrated with the wiki, so that you can link stuff back and forth without throwing users to another website.✎

Alex Schroeder The section on poor community aptly describes what I feel towards Stackexchange and Wikipedia. But I still participate. Maybe less enthusiastically than before, and avoiding the authoritarian feedback, but I still write and vote. Simple answers to stupid questions are still useful. I will learn or not, on my own terms. Not every question needs to be a learning experience. But poor community bites. ✎